Being a lawyer is a lousy way to prepare to become a judge.

By Joel Hechter, Associate

A good lawyer looks at the available facts, and develops a theory to explain them. A great lawyer is flexible enough to revise that theory when necessary, but always maintains a partisan bias. Lawyers advocate. Listening is goal oriented. Once committed, a successful lawyer aggressively seeks flaws in contradictory accounts. Lawyers work long hours, and often have little time for quiet self-reflection.

All of this is pretty much antithetical to the discipline of maintaining an open mind.

All one can hope for in a judge is a person willing to give the case a fair hearing. Judges like that are rarer than they should be.

But there's a further problem. A colleague of mine refers to it as "judge-itis". I call it hubris.

Judges are given terrible power, and too many think that they're smarter than anyone else in the room (not a good combination: why bother listening to the lawyers before you, who may have spent months sifting through the evidence, when you already know what the right result will be from your initial read of the submissions?)